April 2, 2010

I think that lately the comments section of this blog has been attracting a lot Mobys. Yesterday, I called attention to a commenter who wrote something outrageous (and actually funny, if you recognize it as fake). A very high-traffic blog had exposed me to criticism for having that in my comments, and a commenter over there suggested it was a "false flag operation," and linked to a post by SEK over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, that begins: "I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools'!" Now, I already thought I was dealing with a Moby, and here was SEK, apparently, bragging about being a Moby. So I threw him a link and quoted him. He then showed up in my comments and said:

Dear Ann,

I didn't write any of those comments. You just got fooled twice over by your own racist and misogynist commenters. Please, feel free to check the IP addresses of the comments I claimed, all April-Foolsy, to have written.

I was in the middle of a 1000-mile drive, so I wasn't exactly anguishing over my failure to pick up whatever-the-hell SEK had layered into his blog post that was written in the form of a confession. My response to that — written at 11:23 at night from an I-80 rest stop in Iowa — was:

Someone was fooling, either you, per your confession, or someone else, if you're not fooling now. It makes no difference to me who did it. It wasn't one of our regulars and it wasn't a believable story.

The attempt to paint my commenters (or me!) as racist or whatever is inflammatory and ugly, and I've lost track of who wants that to stop.

Now, SEK has updated his post, with a not-too-attractive mix of hostile insults and whiny fears for his own fate:

You Althouse people really aren’t very bright. To anyone who thinks that I actually wrote the comments paraphrased above, I suggest you click here and enter my last name into the “Instructor” field. I’ll wait … so are you really ready to accuse me of writing that?

Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK. Is that me being not very bright? Or are you patently a fool?

I’m only asking because, unlike Althouse, who has tenure and can misbehave as she pleases, I’m a lowly lecturer who, if he steps out of line, will be fired on the spot.

So why are you being so hostile and calling people names? It's interesting that you feel vulnerable, but what are you doing slugging people and then claiming vulnerability when you get a response.

Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me. If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog. She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat. So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to. If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.

As noted above, I do not have a collection of IP addresses. I have no way to check who's behind the various pseudonyms, so you're on your own denying that you wrote what you previously said you wrote. I believed you then, and you ask me to believe you now, and the reason you're supposed to be believable now is that you have a strong self-interest in disassociating yourself from your own words. You made your own problem, and yet you are still being nasty to me, trying to smear me with racism for nothing but maintaining a free-speech forum. You accuse me of lying for quoting you. You threaten to sue me — for quoting you! — and at the same time whine that you can't afford to sue me. You stress that you would like to see me fired — for what?! — and yet you beg in the most pusillanimous fashion that I should pity you because you could be fired.

This is all so pathetic. Or is this another satire that I'm not bright enough to understand?

Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.

144 comments:

Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me. If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog. She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat. So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to. If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.

This is the funniest stuff evah.

Did he put on a diaper before he wrote that 'cause it definitely sounds like he might of messed himself?

Wait. So first he claimed he wrote the offensive comments over here. Now he says that he didn't - he was just kidding about writing those offensive comments - but now he's very offended that anyone would think that he wrote those offensive comments.

Unless a real crime is alluded to or suggested, or if someone is tending toward homicidal ideation, blog comments are harmless fluff, about as important as an ant walking through a macaroni noodle in the kitchen of a small house in a ghost town in eastern Oregon, abandoned since 1892.

I particularly like his assumption that we would equate "works for a university" with "can't be a bigot".

He clearly has spent no time around here at all!

I’m still curious who is supposed to have said that “tea bags were at the boston tea party”. Was that me? I read the whole thread yesterday and I have no idea what he’s talking about except to make some childish joke that makes no sense (and since that was his whole post, maybe I should just say never mind!).

All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely Mobys:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.And then the whining school-boy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lined,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

By wading through the comments, I answered one of my questions about the stupidest callout: for this SEK person “again nice try…the tea bags, a reference to the Boston TEA PARTY, for the History/Metaphor impaired” = “claims that there were tea bags at the Boston Tea Party”. Idiot.

Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.

"Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK."

Actually you do. His name is Scott Eric Kaufman. You can find his CV (such as it is) by following the link under the headline at Lawyers, Guns & Money. He evidently lectures at UC Irvine on "argument and research" which, presumably is why he couldn't possibly have written those comments he lampoons. Since he doesn't exactly say why finding out his class schedule would be relevant, I can't accuse him of the fallacy of appeal to authority. He does, however, commit several fallacies of composition, so I'm guessing his courses aren't very helpful. Still, maybe he is more careful with logic when he is being paid to be, which, I hear, is a prime motivator for some people.

Left/right debate in America (especially on blogs) now consists almost entirely of each side trying to find the most extreme and outrageous elements on the other and holding them up as examplars of that ideology.

"See? This is who they are!!"

Apparently, the left is trying to plant those elements as part of the strategy.

Actually as a fellow [blogspot] blogger I do have access to IP addresses that visit my sites. I just don't have a way of tying the IP address to a comment or to a name. But I am more than certain there is a way.

SMGalbraithBingo! You got it. Both liberals and conservatives point to the most outrageously stupid one among the opposite side and then paint everybody under that label with that brush. Typically human behavior.

Can I just say how much I hate it in general when somebody says something, and you take them at face value, and then they are like “psyche! I got you!”. Especially when it’s something innocuous, that you would generally expect truth on. Why do people do that?

If this happened to me, I'd handle it like so. Instead, well, we've got things like this.

Unfortunately, almost all of those who say bad things about me - including objectively horrible things and just stupid things - do so anonymously. I can't recall anyone ever speaking out against such things, despite them being far worse than this case.

Welcome to the Internet, where someone hiding their identity tries to "besmirch" a person (Althouse) willing to put her name on her words, all by quoting another person hiding their identity who may or may not be saying what he or she actually thinks.

Althouse, you are nothing but a cunt bitch ice-queen whore. That's because you provide a forum for right-wing propaganda and you dress it up to make it superficially appear to be a forum for free speech.

You are a threat to the establishment and your forum needs to be destroyed. If you can be fired from your high-paying job, which you assuredly are not qualified for, then all the better.

Your commenters are a bunch of weirdos. And so many of them are gays... what's up with that? Your comment section is like a roach motel for the slimy fags of the Right.

That's my opinion from Southern California. Now can we all just accept this as the truth and move on, because this comment drama is boooring...

Alex admits that he's messing with us (I wouldn't say Moby, because he doesn't appear to be trying to make anyone look bad) by just arguing whichever side he feels like.

I agree that Florida and NewHam are both mobys and probably the same person.

I don't think shoutingthomas is a moby, because I've seen him post here before in apparent seriousness, and he seems to have a blog as well. I think he's just an ass with crazy flair.

As for Chase (of the you say teabagger, I say cunt story), I know he (or another Chase) has posted here before in apparent seriousness, but I certainly didn't think that he was serious with that story- either it was made up completely or a wild exaggeration to prove a "point." - Lyssa

That Freeman Hunt person. Moby for sure. False personna. Think about the name: "Free-man." Obviously made up. She's not a man (maybe) and she's married (maybe) which means she's not free. In fact I think Althouse is Free-man Hunt.

Thomas quoting Steve Sailer is a point in his non-moby favor, in the same way that quoting, say, Karl Polanyi would raise the probability of someone being a real lefty. Sailer's a big favorite among genuine racists.

In the really cool new show "Justified" there is a racist character played by Walton Goggins the dude who played Shane on "The Shield."

Anyway he plays the leader of a white supremacist group and he takes a new guy out when he blows up a black church with a rocket launcher. After it's done he sits behind the new guy and starts questioning him to find out if he is an FBI plant or a Moby if you will. He is undecided but takes out his gun and shoots him in the head anyway. Just to be on the safe side.

I like to avoid commenting on blog wars! But I will. I am sure S.T. isn't a moby. I encountered his blog a while ago, since he lives in Woodstock which is near my hometown, and had written a short post about my niece's store, which upset her. It wasn't a big deal, but as a business owner, she took it personally. Anyway, I was quite surprised when he showed up here in the comments months ago. From reading his blog, I have gathered that he disdains modern white women and prefers Filipinas. So that part of what he wrote in the comments here is an actual belief of his, and a pattern. However, when I visited the site, I never detected racism in his blog posting, before his comments recently. I suspect some of his bitterness comes from living in Woodstock, which is a hard place for anyone to navigate. Then, there is ageism in his profession (and in a lot of others, big surprise), why he resorted to ethnic/racial/gender rather than youth scapegoating is a mystery.

I was under the impression that a "Moby" was a commenter who would pretend to be other than he/she really is in order to gradually make their opposition look bad.

For example: a liberal posts on a conservative site pretending to be a conservative and then gradually becomes more and more unhinged, racist, misogynistic etc., so that people think that all conservatives are terrible people. The Moby tries to get the other posters to confirm the worst by pretending, at first, to be a normal poster.

Jeremy wouldn't fall into that category since his schtick is to try to bait people into stupid arguments and to totally disrupt the thread with side bars and distractions. He is a troll. He never pretends to be a conservative. However, the Jeremy persona is sometimes made up of several posters.

Hey of course he didn't kill Walter even though in the original story he did. It is just that the story arch is so good that they kept him on. You see he only shot him once where the other guys he shot three times. He knew what he was doing.

What is going to be fun is when his dad shows up who is a hard core criminal. That should be really interesting.

The Elmore Leonard flair is apparent in the little details. Like the black dude who came down from Detroit to Kentucky. You see that a lot in his novels. I think it is paticularly well done and puts to shame the dreck that the big networks put on TV these days.

Your moby is a very disturbed guy--obsessed with deceiving people, trying very hard to feel superior to others, lonely, frightened, extremely hostile, malignantly naricissistic, and paranoid that what he is doing to others will come back to bite him in the ass. A very sick puppy. He actually is in the same psychological category (though not quite as crazy, at least not yet) as Ted Kosinski.

Ok, I know that conservatives try to pretend they are smart as liberals and they are choosing conservatism out of a rational weighing of the options instead of fearfulness, bigotry, misogyny, and homophobie ....

SO HERE IS THE BIG QUESTION FOR YOU TO PRACTICE ON WITH YOUR BIG BRAINS:

what was special about april 1st when this was posted that would provide some clue that it should not be taken at face value?

Hint #1: It is NOT that liberals just like to make things up!

Hint #2: It has something to do with April and the second word rhymes with "tools"!

Give up?

=========

Seriously, did you not encounter a single other website with an April Fool's joke?

@Trooper York: That wouldn't make Jeremy a Moby. That would make him a troll.

A Moby is what used to be called an agent provocateur. It is someone whose expressions seem sympathetic to the cause, while at the same time are calculated to bring the group into disrepute or steer it into a self-destructive path.

By contrast, a troll is hostile, tendentious, stupid, disrespectful, antisocial, sometimes off-topic, and usually expressing sentiments calculated to provoke an angry response.

Both Mobys and trolls should, in a perfect world, be lined up against a wall and shot.

No I have never been there. It is on my list of places to avoid with such scenic sites as the Love Canal, Detroit and Fenway Park. You know eyesores and the locus of evil that all true men should avoid.

SEK - Apparantly a guy who got his PhD at 34 and is hanging around where he graduated from teaching arriving freshmen the mandatory English Composition class at UCi. As a Lecturer drone amongst hundreds. Not exactly an academic superstar. Maybe a little "you are tenured!!" bitterness....That comes from that special situation of getting that late PhD in your mid-30 from a middling humanities place. And facing that life is not going to be tenure track - but to crank out the frosh you are assigned, along with a "nice that you write about comic books and show your intellectual superiority baiting people on Internet blogs!" (from better situated and more gifted UCi Leftists you desperately seek to impress).

Hence his strange little obsession with pointing out "composition flaws" of others while ummmmm..not exactly checking his own product out too closely.

Pity is that Scott Eric Kaufman is probably just smart enough to see his likely fate down the road.He will be teaching english comp to arriving freshmen 11 years from now, 18 years from now. If he is lucky, and California does not get so financially strapped they have to discard surplus staff and surplus lecturers soon.

Ahh, Trooper York is on the scene. I thought I heard the pathetic mewling of a giants fan. Remind me again how far into the playoffs your loser team sallied? Oh yeah, they didn't make the playoffs, they finished just ahead of the doltish redskins.

I drove around on the internet and found some of SEK's tedious thoughts on writers and writing. YouTube has some splendid bits of his actual utterances. I would hope that he doesn't teach any of your children. Mine are safely in better schools.

Unfortunately SEK spent his undergrad days at, and graduated from, my alma mater, LSU. LSU has had a hard enough time solidifying its academic chops as something other than a football factory wo. having SEK as part of its baggage.

Spend any time over at LG&M and you'll find that the primary purpose of that little lefty coterie of "academics" and its regular commentators seems to be to operate in full-time self-congratulatory snark mode patting themselves on the back for being oh-so-much-more intellectually and morally superior to conservatives. As if this crowd hasn't already figured that out....

Now, now Lawgiver don't be bitter. I agree the Giants had a poor year.This season belongs to our friend Beth and her New Orleans 'Aints. Let's congratulate her because that only happens once in a blue moon. You know like Jerry Jones signing a useful free agent or Jeremy getting laid. It happens so infrequently you have to acknowledge it.

Burgeoning academics? Gotta use all the tricks of the trade to get hired.

I'm still confused, however.

So, SEK was being sarcastic about not being a racist?

Probably safely anti-Semitic though, what with the UCI connection.

Anyone who writes that stuff--whatever they claim--has a inner pool they're drawing from. Even if I was trying to make a point I don't think I could come up with the sort of racist/sexist comments. I would suspect they see it as a sin to overcome, but maybe that's why they see it in others. And writing all that is like letting out the steam. It feels sooo good, but they know it's wrong.

Mobyism is going to render a whole group of people incapable of forming lasting marriages.

I can't believe this guy is a law professor. Doesn't this profession have any standards? Don't you at least have to be past puberty emotionally. We don't let people who can't flush a toilet have jobs teaching plumbing.

Blogging does this a lot in both directions: You see accomplished people who write things that make you wonder how the hell they ever got where they are and other seemingly average people who are brilliant. It's one of the best things about it: no arbitrary filters.

There are plenty of racist teabaggers. We've all seen the signs. There are plenty of non-racist teabaggers, too. Good for them. Good for all of them.

With that in mind, the Professor should not devote blog posts to her theory that the teabaggers are being "set up" and that none of are racist. It makes her look, at best, naive, and at worst, like an apologist for racist teabaggers.

Regarding the other professor, SEK, I took an undergrad course from him at UCI. Small world. Hi Scott!

On my well-known and extensively read blog, I have installed some incredible hidden source code for a gadget called ISP Kung-Fu Takeout 3000.

It emails me the ISP and physical address of all commenters the instant each comment is posted. If I don't like the comment, I click on the taupe colored button labeled GOTCHA!

Immediately thereafter a ninja shows up at the commentors front door ostensibly to deliver and order of General Tso's Chicken, but actually to gain access to the commenters residence in order to nun-chuck the commenter to the floor, then kick his/her ass for being annoying. Fingers get broken.

Think I'm making this up? Just ask yourself this question: Why haven't I read any comments form the blogging cockroach in a while?

"With that in mind, the Professor should not devote blog posts to her theory that the teabaggers are being "set up" and that none of are racist."

OR, and I know its tough to get your mind around so bear with me here.....PERHAPS since the democrats and media are going out of their way to portray ALL tea party people as racist homophobes, she is devoting blog posts refuting the clearly untrue accusations. And with the congressmen march thru the crowd, being set up is a real concern.

Once again, I'll say that SEK's post was a poorly written attempt to be clever, and that its main aftereffect will be to give support to people here when they want to use the Moby excuse whenever some conservative commenter says something bigoted or otherwise embarrassing to other conservatives. Nice going, SEK. Way to add something to the conversation. And your whining followup doesn't help your position.

That's a great point, somefeller. Now any time the occasional Jew hating conservative or miscellaneous bigot on the right starts to spout here, I don't have to go through my litany about William F. Buckley and how that's not conservatism and all that. I can just call the fucker a Moby and be done with it.

I'm mad that a political party cynically exploited white America's guilt about its relationship with Black America (note capitalization) in order to front a far left fringe candidate who is schooled in Alinskyist tactics but who had zero prior experience in executive leadership. Does that make me a racist?

I agree that NewHam is probably a Moby and I suspect that he is the same person as Jeremy. Seems to have way too much time to post comments and nearly all are stupid and inflammatory, just like what "Jeremy" thinks the right wingnuts would believe. Storm the Capitol! Blood in the streets!

Anyway, now that we have conducted our scientific, opinion-based analysis, can we have a purge?

Jason, I did not say that "Jeremy" understands conservative rhetoric, I only posit that he as "NewHam" posts what he believes is "conservative", and what is in reality a caricature of Tea Party opinion.

The only reason I think NewHam is Jeremy is the frequency and random nature of his comments.

You very likely COULD determine the IP of a comment, but it's quite academic to do so if the person uses a proxy or warez to register a bogus IP number.

Besides which, it kind of smells to me like successful troll is succeeding yet again: everyone is sure taking his remarks more seriously than cancer all of a sudden, & all he had to do was play along with the idiotic drama as it rattled along to its predictable non-conclusion, knowing as certainly as tomorrow's sunrise that the rubes would chump themselves FOR him.

This is not going to make any of the ladies here any happier with me, but - here goes.

The comment in which I called the friend of my friend a "cunt" after she repeatedly referred to tea-party members as "teabaggers" is true - it happened exactly as written. My friend is still a little hot at me for doing that in front of her friend's 11 year old daughter, and I frankly have to admit that I am growing a bit more uncomfortable with it myself. The background is that I left a business meeting earlier that day very angry at the lunch arguments that involved the teabagger vs tea-partier crap. I then listened to NPR on my way home where someone interviewed used the term. and I was still stewing about how often liberals get away with such terrible name-calling and the media so very often supports such. I got home, the wife said we're going over to our friend's and then an opportunity to test my new desire to respond to the thoughtless and rude people who used the sexually derogatory term for people I personally know to be good and decent people. What an asshole she was.

As a child I heard my mother call one of our neighbors an asshole to her face because my mom asked the woman to stop calling our garbage men "niggers". It was in Kansas City in the late 60's and the woman didn't know any better. But my mother told our neighbor that she was wrong to keep doing it in front of children, and when the woman laughed at my mother, Mom said "alright,then I'll refer to you and your family as "the assholes". The neighbor woman stopped smiling and - I'll never forget the look of rage on her red face - turned and walked home. It was the second time my mother had confronted someone on our street about racist attitudes in front of children. The neighbors next door, older folks we didn't know as well, came over later that evening when my father was home. They stood at the front door and thanked my Mom for standing up for "right principles" and told our family how proud we should be of our mother. I am proud of both my parents taking a stand against ignorance and hatred. And - that neighbor cooled off and became friendly again, but I never heard her use "nigger" in the street again.

One can be innocent of the knowledge of a term: my wife used the term "dildo" frequently when I met her, thinking it meant stupid. I thought she knew the real meaning until one day - in the church prayer room before Sunday services - she apologized for "being such a dildo" because she forgot to bring something. The pastor asked if she knew the real meaning of the word - my wife said "Yeah, it means stupid". Education time. At least she wasn't calling someone else that.

Ignorance of the term is irrelevant when it is used on someone else. I SHOULD have interrupted the woman at our friend's house with "excuse me, but teabagger is an over the top derogatory term - are you aware of it's meaning"? That would have been better, and I see so after having had time away from the moment. Mea culpa.

Lastly - there is no parity in the getting away with derogatory terms. The left- aided by a majority willful media - use far more perjorative terms to describe their opponents and enemies IN THE OPEN MEDIA than does the right. For every "femiNazi" - a reaction to the freely thrown about in the Media labeling of all men as "Chauvinist" and "misogynist" - there are 5 unchallenged in the media terms from the left. And then -oh my, Rush said a bad word!" - feigned outrage when the left itself is skewered.

The next time someone on the left decrys a derogatory term hurled from the right they should look in the mirror- what have they done to stop the hate-filled terms on their own political side?

Chase, all well and good, but you used the woman's kid. Regardless of the topic or provocation, that makes you a complete asshole in at least that situation. (The "at least" is there because--after all--you recounted the damn story publicly here, and, to me anyway, in such a manner that you seemed to feel not just justified but proud in bringing the kid into it.

What your parents have done, laudable or not, has nothing to do with that.

reader - I'm curious. Did your children attend public school? This is not a "gotcha" question.

My wife knows how you feel - she was appalled that I explained the meaning of "teabagger" to the woman's daughter - and I'm wondering if this relates to mothers immediately thinking of and relating to the protection of the child first.

It's got to do with 1) protection of a child [especially one who's not your responsibility AND not your business], which is an issue of both appropriateness and boundaries and 2) using a child as a way to express hostility toward and get back at an adult, which is an issue of both the above plus creepiness, sneakiness and immaturity.

I can say with complete certainty that I would have reacted the same way to your story when my child was in school (private, but they're not THAT different, believe me) for four years, I would react the same way now when I am homeschooling (though not sheltering) him, and I would react the same way year after next or so, when he is likely to go into the public schools.

BTW, I'm the go-to parent for explanations of words, concepts etc. etc. that might in some way touchy, or whatever. One, I was raised in a more open fashion than my husband and, two, he was never, ever a potty mouth, whereas I am a (now long-term) recovering potty mouth of, at one time, towering proportions (though never in front of kids not my own age).

We homeschooled our 3 children, each through middle school. They then went to private school for high school and then college. One is now a teacher, one is now in the National Road Show of a Broadway play, and one is a Marine.

My curiosity had to do with protection. My wife (a credentialed teacher when i met her) insisted on homeschooling in the beginning partially because of environment - since my wife could teach as well as any public school teacher - she was one - we could control the environment, particuarly against wrong speech patterns( epithets, cursing, et al).